Anti spam filter

2007-03-08 10:33:40

( Computers )



Spam, or unsolicited bulk email (UBE), are email messages sent randomly to recipients without their consent. Spam messages are often commercial in nature and have very low value. Spam messages clog the inbox folders of email accounts and often cause much annoyance on the part of the recipient, limited space for important emails, and traffic in servers.

Spam filters are the answers to spam problems. Each anti spam filter uses a unique set of mathematical equations in sorting messages and blocking spam but, all of which are designed to answer the question, “Is message x spam?”. An anti spam filter is capable of distilling the body of an incoming email message into, for instance, separate words. The anti spam filter then uses a Boolean search to sift through the email content. In using the Boolean method, the ordering of the words is ignored. Finally, methods such as rule based or statistics based methods are employed to determine whether or not the incoming message is spam or not. The rule based method evaluates the message using a set criteria. Statistics-based method evaluates the message based on word frequency.

However, spam messages continue to evolve side-by-side with the developments in anti spam filters so that there is no guarantee that spam mail will not pass through a network or desktop computer equipped with an anti spam filter.

One of the latest anti spam filters that has been gaining wide popularity is the barracuda spam filter. The barracuda spam filter lets the recipient personally sift through his incoming email messages. It consists of three folders from which the recipient may classify each message as “deliver”, “whitelist”, or “delete”.

Pressing the “deliver” button prompts the barracuda spam filter to deliver the message to the recipient’s standard mailbox. Pressing the “whitelist” button prompts it not to classify future messages from the same sender under the quarantine folder. Pressing “delete” removes the email message. However, pressing the “delete” button does not automatically list the sender of the deleted message as a spammer. The barracuda anti spam filter provides a button that reads, “classify as spam” which users are encouraged to press to prevent receiving any other email message from the same spammer. Similarly, it provides a button which reads, “classify as not spam” which users are encouraged to press to prevent legitimate messages from being quarantined in the future.


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